Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/20

 Virgil was now acknowledged the greatest poet of Italy. In the year 26, one year after the title Augustus had been conferred on Octavius, we find the emperor writing Virgil the most urgent letters begging the poet to send him, then in Spain, some portion of the projected Æneid. It was, however, considerably later when Virgil read to Augustus the second, fourth, and sixth books, for the young Marcellus, the emperor's nephew, died in 23 , and we are told that Octavia, his mother, fainted on hearing the poet read the immortal lines about her son in the sixth book:—

"Child of a nation's sorrow! Were there hope of thy breaking the tyranny of fate, thou shalt be Marcellus. Bring me handfuls of lilies, that I may strew the grave with their dazzling hues, and crown, if only with these gifts, my young descendant's shade, and perform the vain service of sorrow."

Virgil,

"who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in his readers' eyes,"

had already spent some ten years on the Æneid, when in 19 he decided to devote three years to its revision and improvement amid the "famous cities" and scenes of Greece and Asia. It is in anticipation of this voyage that his friend Horace prays the winds to

"Speed thee, O ship, as I pray thee to render Virgil, a debt duly lent to thy charge, Whole and intact on the Attican borders Faithfully guarding the half of my soul."

Augustus, however, met him at Athens and persuaded him to accompany his own return. But Virgil was never again to see Rome. He contracted a fever in Greece. It grew worse on the homeward trip; and he died, a few days after landing, in Brundisium, having reached the age of fifty-one. His tomb looks down upon the bay of Naples,